Introduction

Users can be a real pain. I don't mean the people, though doubtless that's sometimes true. But keeping UNIX user accounts and file permissions in sync across a network of machines, some of them running different operating systems, can be very challenging without some kind of centralized configuration management.

So a new developer joins the organization and needs an account on every machine, along with sudo privileges and group memberships, and needs her SSH key authorized for a bunch of different accounts? The sysadmin who has to take care of this manually will be at the job all day. The sysadmin who uses Puppet will be done in minutes, and heading out for an early lunch.

In this chapter we'll look at some handy patterns and techniques for managing users and their associated resources. Users are also one of the most common applications for virtual resources, so we'll find out all about those. We'll also see how to schedule resources in Puppet, how to spread cron jobs around the...